Imperial Washington

There are the two militaries' enormous investments in logistical capability and in training. There are shared concerns about the ability to fight on multiple fronts at once. There are increasing manpower shortages, with Rome responding by incorporating "barbarians" into its legions and the U.S. Army by lowering its recruiting standards and relying, more and more, on private contractors.

And there is the recurring question of what true security means.

Murphy cites a 4th-century letter from a concerned Roman citizen to his emperor, which "makes the very modern point that security isn't just a matter of raw military power but also derives from a society's overall health." These days, that point is often made by concerned American citizens on the political left. But Murphy -- a registered independent who has voted for presidential candidates of both parties and thinks "centrist" is a fair term to describe his political views -- supports it with a quotation from a man whose military credentials are unimpeachable.

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired," Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower said in 1950, "signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed."

'I'll Make a Buck as I Do It'

"I forget how wonderful a place like this is," Murphy says as he leads the way up the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Schoolchildren line up to be photographed in front of Lincoln's statue, or flop on the ground to sketch it.

Murphy isn't here to admire Lincoln, however. He wants to point out the Roman fasces -- bundles of sticks bound with straps -- sculpted into the arms of Honest Abe's chair.

By the time they were used here, the fasces had become an innocent symbol associated with the old Roman republic, which the Founding Fathers greatly admired, and they'd lost the ax that often accompanied the sticks and straps. But "what they really were," Murphy says, "was a portable kit for flogging and decapitation," menacingly paraded in advance of Roman consuls.

The next stop is a nondescript building at 401 14th St. SW, where a sign reads Financial Management Service. This, too, takes a bit of explanation.

The biggest element in the Roman government by far, Murphy says, was the military, but "the next biggest was ensuring that grain came to Rome from the various breadbaskets of the empire." Ships from all around the Mediterranean unloaded their cargo at Rome's harbor city, Ostia, from which the grain moved by barge to immense docking and storage facilities that lined the river Tiber. By contrast, the flood of tax revenue that keeps the U.S. government in business arrives electronically (and almost invisibly, Murphy marvels) at this little known arm of the Treasury Department.

But the most surprising and thought-provoking analogy Murphy makes on the whole "Are We Rome?" tour is one for which he hasn't got a specific stop picked out. He settles for a stroll across K Street NW, symbolic home of the Washington lobbying establishment, and an expense-account lunch at McCormick & Schmick's.

This particular analogy starts with a question: "Where is the boundary between public good and private advantage, between 'ours' and 'mine'?" It's a question, Murphy writes, increasingly relevant in America, "where some form of degenerative neuro-political condition has left government responsive to particular interests but deaf to the popular will." A more specific version of the analogy involves the increasingly fashionable practice of "privatization," in which government functions are farmed out to private contractors.